Amos Kwok

Worth his salt?

The Latin word for salt is sal. Salt was an important commodity in the Roman empire. It was used to flavour food and more importantly to preserve food at a time when refrigeration did not exist. Roman soldiers were given regular rations of precious salt or they were given an allowance to buy salt. That allowance was called a salarium. And from salarium, we derive our English word salary.

Now, is that where we get the expression, "a worker who is worth his salt"? A quick search reveals that the phrase "worth is salt" goes only as far back as 1830. One appearance was in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island: "It was plain from every line of his body that our new hand was worth his salt."

So is the phrase "worth his salt" related to being paid in salt? I have no idea though it is enticing to link the two.

Titillating vs Tantalizing

I saw a print ad on the side of a taxi for barbecued pork. It featured Sharon Au saying that the meat was "titillating". I nearly choked. That's because I had always associated titillating with stimulating interest in the erotic sense. I thought a better word in this case would be tantalizing. So I did some research.

Turns out titillating is an adjective that means pleasantly stimulating or exciting. Yes, it does have connotations of erotism but that's a secondary meaning. It primarily means being able to arouse someone to mild excitement. Therefore, it's all right to say that good food titillates the senses.

Tantalizing (or tantalising if you use British spelling) is an adjective which means possessing a quality that arouses or stimulates desire or interest. For example:

The tantalising details of the iPad rumours fuel the imaginations of Apple fans.  

The origins of tantalize are in Greek mythology where Tantalus stole ambrosia and nectar from the gods (plus he practised cannibalism and other atrocities). As his punishment, he was made to stand in a pool of water in Hades over which the branches of a fruit tree hung. Whenever he tried to reach up for the fruit, the branches would bend out of this reach. Whenever he bent down to get a drink, the water receded from him so he could not get any. From his sorry tale, we now take his name to refer to food that is desirable.

Evolution of goodbye

Some older folks spell goodbye with a hyphen like so: good-bye. Initially, the phrase wasn't even just two words. There were four. The original phrase was God be with you. This was a farewell often used in the late 16th century. It's such a nice thing to say. I still hear it once in awhile but not often enough.

Over time, the phrase was reduced and shortened. We can see examples of its shrinking in text like Shakespeare's God be wy you and God buy' ye. By the 18th century, the word God had been replaced with good and the appearance of good-bye was prevalant. It's possible that the substitution of God with good is the result of influence of other phrases like good day and good night.

A double heart

From the Bible, we have inherited a few interesting phrases with the word double in it. Two examples are a double heart and a double mind. Merely hearing the phrase leads one to think that a double heart refers to a person whose heart is moving in two different directions. And that would be quite close to its meaning as it appears in the Bible.

Psalm 12:2—"Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak."

In Hebrew, the literal expression is "a heart and a heart". It means someone who is capable of double-crossing and lying. I find that expression very interesting. Likewise, when the Bible speaks of differing weights in Deuteronomy in 25:13, the Hebrew phrase is literally "a stone and a stone".

Deuteronomy in 25:13—"You shall not have in your bag two kinds of weights, a large and a small..."

Which leads me to wonder about the phrase "double-minded man" found in James 1:8.

James 1:8—"He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways."

The book of James was written in Greek, but perhaps the Hebrew style of using the word twice when a contradiction or contrast was needed was carried over. I'll need someone with more expertise in Koine Greek to confirm this.

Yo-yo

The yo-yo is an all-American toy that is familiar to just about everyone. It seems with every generation, it pops up and is extremely popular for a season then fades away, only to reappear again (often with a new marketing campaign and new technology). This is called the yo-yo effect. (Kidding!)

Since my kids are now into yo-yos, I thought I'd do a little digging into the etymology of the word. Turns out the word is from the Philippines. In fact, it's from Ilocano, in northern Luzon. Were yo-yos invented by the Filipinos?

A little more digging around and I discovered that yo-yos have been around for a long, long time. The oldest surviving yo-yo dates from 550B.C. and was made of terra cotta. It's from Greece and there is a painting on a vase that shows a boy playing with a yo-yo. Naturally, it wasn't called a yo-yo then.

In the 1800s, the French referred to the toy as a bandalore while the English referred to it as a quiz. Then in 1916, Scientific American publishes an article about Filipino toys and makes mention of the yo-yo. But the watershed year for the modern yo-yo was 1923 when Pedro Flores, a Filipino living in the US, makes a yo-yo in the tradition of his forefathers. In 1928, he opens his first yo-yo factory in Santa Barbara. The yo-yo craze takes off, helped along by Flores's yo-yo contests.

Then along comes Donald Duncan who sees the potential and buys out the factory and the brand name from Flores. Duncan renames the product as a Duncan yo-yo. And with clever marketing, the yo-yo phenomenon really took off. That's the story of the yo-yo. I like the idea that such an "American toy" actually has roots going back to the Philippines and further back into ancient Greece.

Find out more about yo-yo history from the Duncan website.

Limelight

As I was in the car today, travelling through the streets of Jakarta, I saw a sign that had the word limelight on it. It's commonly understand that to be in the limelight means to be in the center of attention. But what does that have to do with the fruit?

As it turns out, not much. The reference to lime is actually calcium oxide. Limelight was a type of stage lighting used theatres and music halls in the 1860s and 1870s. An oxyhydrogen flame is directed at a cylinder of lime (calcium oxide) and through the combined effects of incandescence and candoluminescence, it produces a bright, intense light. The beam of light is then directed at a performer on stage. The original limelight has since been replaced by modern spotlights but the term still endures.

Plural of genius

[Corrected 21 Sep 2010.] Here's another odd plural. The plural of genius is... geniuses. I originally thought that since the word had Latin roots, it would take the common Latin plural of genii. But it's one of those words whose evolution has led the use of genii (pronounced gee-nee-i) to be restricted solely as the plural of mythical spirits.

Incidentally, the word etymology of genius is fascinating. It used to refer to the attendant spirit present at one's birth, then it evolved to mean a person's characteristic or disposition and that led to the sense of a person's natural ability. And that evolved so that it now referred to someone's exceptional natural ability. So there's the link between the spirit and brain power.  See OxfordDictionaries.com.

Humble pie

To eat humble pie means to eat a figurative serving of humiliation, usually accompanied by forced submission, an apology or a retraction. But why is this figurative food a pie?

This goes back the 17th century when poor English folks are a pie made up of the innards of a deer (heart, liver, kidney and other offal.) These inexpensive innards were combined with apples, currants, sugar and spices. Servants often dined on this while their masters dined on the venison.

Some etymologists claim this pie was called "numble pie". Others claim it stemmed from "umble", a reference to umbilical cord, yet another part of the offal. Whichever the case, the pie eventually became "umble pie". And since after the Middle Ages, many English words were pronounced without the initial "h" (e.g., hotel), the dish began to be spelt as "humble pie". This was a fitting spelling as it was a poor man's dish.

To add colour to the discussion, the word humble comes from the Latin word for earth, humus. We usually think of humble folks as being "down to earth" so it's not hard to imagine a pie filled with dirt that you have to eat when you are humiliated.

The skin of my teeth

I've used this expression countless times before and never realised it had its roots in the Hebrew language. I discovered that while reading, The Origin of the Bible. The expression is a Hebrew one that first appeared in this form in the Geneva Bible (1560). In Job 19:20, it reads:

My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.

This was a change from an earlier translation by Miles Coverdale (1535) which reads:

My bone hangeth to my skin, and the flesh is away, only there is left me the skin about my teeth.

Though the Geneva Bible is more succinct in its expression, when I saw Coverdale's translation, I suddenly understood what the Hebrew expression was getting at. Obviously we have no skin on our teeth, but Job is actually referring to his gums, the "skin" around his teeth. At this point in Job's lament, he was saying that he had so little flesh left that the only visible flesh on him were his gums.

That expression has evolved in meaning and has come to mean narrowly escaping a situation by the thinnest margin imaginable. For what can be thinner than the non-existent skin on our teeth?

Writers have been using the expression with this meaning for the longest time. Mark Twain remarked in his book Roughing It, "I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the skin of his teeth." And Thorton Wilder wrote a Pulitzer-Prize winning play entitled, you guessed it, The Skin of Our Teeth.

In today's English Bibles, the sense of having narrowly escape is now in the verse. The ESV version of Job 19:20 reads:

My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh,
and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.

The footnotes in the ESV Study Bible do note that modern readers think of the phrase as an idiomatic expression for just barely accomplishing or avoiding something. That meaning certainly fits the verse but readers get a deeper dimension when they realise the original meaning.

How interesting that the Hebrew language has contributed such a quaint expression to the English language.

Typhoon and its Cantonese origins

I had always thought typhoon was a Japanese word. But my father-in-law corrected me today. He said that the word was actually Chinese in origin. Specifically, its roots are from the Cantonese words for "big wind", i.e., dai fung. I was pretty impressed with that. I checked the Merriam-Webster and it also adds that there are etymological roots with a similar Arabic word tūfān (which means hurricane) and also from the Greek word typhōn (which means violent storm). Somehow, I think that's a stretch because typhoons are used only in reference to storms on Asia Pacfic's coast.

Allan Metcalf, in his book, "The World in so Many Words", points out that because of the British presence in Hong Kong for 150 years, the English language has absorbed a number of Cantonese words (the dominant Chinese dialect spoken in Hong Kong). He records 1771 as the year that typhoon entered the Engish lexicon. Other Cantonese words that entered the English language include sampan (boat, 1620), tong (secret society, 1883), cheongsam (dress with slit skirt, 1952), and shar-pei (dog, 1975).